Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Looking to show some compelling data? Daveed recommends using the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit to not only set people see charts and figures as visualizations, but also to interact with them. Sure, it takes a little extra work than a typical pie chart, but the InfoVis Toolkit makes a huge impact. The White House even used it to break down the 2012 budget.
Eva took a long look at Terry Border’s unusual photo gallery, which use bent-object sculptures and photo scenes that bring to life anything from peanuts to pill bottles. Border told Wired the photos play with “our preconceived notions of shapes and objects.” Some of our favourites include a marshmallow walking the plank over a hot chocolate mug and a growing ruler being measured. Check outBorder’s blog, Bent Objects, for his latest images.
After seeing some Kobayashi Online reviews suddenly disappear, Brent found out that Google review removal is often arbitrary. There are a few known issues resulting in dropped reviews, such as them being lost through as data spread across multiple databases gets lost, and when a giant housecleaning update to Google’s listings database happens resulting in temporarily dropped reviews. At least person-to-person word of mouth is bug-proof.
We also got out of the office this week and had lunch with a couple wonderful people from the Music Industries Association of Canada (or MIAC), which is Canada’s national, not-for-profit trade association representing retailers, manufacturers and distributors of music products. Thanks for the great time!